Always start with the company, not the job. If people have basic skills and the right fit for the company, they can be trained, while the most skilled people may be ineffective if they can’t work within the company culture.
As a part of my HR Strategy Series, I’m talking to top experts in the field to teach prospects what hiring managers are actually looking for, while also supporting business leaders in their hiring and retention strategies. Today I had the pleasure of talking with Varun Bhatia.
Varun Bhatia is Chief People Officer at Reali. Prior to his work at Reali, Varun has led human resources departments at The Gillette Company, Procter & Gamble, Kraft Foods Group, Levi Strauss & Co., and AirAsia. Varun resides in the Bay Area and has taught courses at the University of California, Berkeley Extension.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! First, please tell us what brought you to this specific career path?
As a Chief People Officer at Reali and after working in human resources for many years, I’m passionate about bringing the right people on board and then retaining them and motivating them. I believe this is really important as there are four things in life that are constrained: time, money, ideas, and execution of those ideas. I believe the only real constraint is time.
Having the right people in an organization can help fuel ideas, enable execution and raise the capital needed to build great companies, and the Human Resources function ensures we have those right people.
Can you share the most interesting or funny story that happened to you since you started this career and what lesson you learned from that?
In the mid-1990s my company was recruiting in Russia. I was based in London, but we flew to Moscow and after meeting many candidates we made an offer. Back then, we didn’t have all the technology that we have now and after we made an offer, we flew back to London where we received a fax from the person rejecting the offer.
Russia was opening up and other companies were recruiting. It was competitive. So, later that same day, we caught another plane back to Moscow to make another offer. We flew back to London where we received yet another rejection. I wish video conferencing existed then, but it did not and ultimately, we went to Moscow a third time to interview another group of candidates. This time, we decided to make two offers thinking one would not work out. But they both accepted the offer for the same role. We created a new role and we hired both candidates.
Wonderful. Now let’s jump into the main focus of our series. Hiring can be very time-consuming and difficult. Can you share 5 techniques that you use to identify the talent that would be best suited for the job you want to fill?
As a core principle, hire for the company and not for the job!
- Focus on the company. Always start with the company, not the job. If people have basic skills and the right fit for the company, they can be trained, while the most skilled people may be ineffective if they can’t work within the company culture.
- Be clear, but not exact about the job. Defining a job is more than a traditional job description. Think about how you see this role right now and how you see it in the future and be very clear about your “must-haves” and “nice-to-haves” without a long laundry list. Focus on four to five key must-haves and two to three “nice-to-haves.”
- Motivational fit. Assess a candidate’s motivation in joining the company. For example, if you have a fast-paced organization where employees have independence and your candidate’s motivation is to work in a steady, structured, process-oriented organization, it may not be a good motivational fit.
- Cultural fit. Will a candidate share the values that we have defined for our company? We’ve created a library of questions to ask in an interview for hiring for different levels — as an individual contributor, a manager, and for a leader — to ascertain whether the person is a good cultural fit.
- Technical fit. Do candidates have the requisite skills and competencies required to do the job?
With so much noise and competition out there, what are your top 3 ways to attract and engage the best talent in an industry when they haven’t already reached out to you?
We have to stand out in the clutter and be clear about who we are as a company.
- We’re hiring for both the company and the job. So be clear, articulate and compelling for what the company stands for in your communication and hire mission-driven people.
- Make sure we are able to “fish where the fish are” rather than casting too wide a net recruiting.
- Rely on referrals, because candidates who come through a referral stay longer and are typically a better cultural fit.
What are the 3 most effective strategies you use to retain employees?
Create an environment where employees experience these three key things and check periodically using pulse surveys to see if they can answer these questions for themselves positively
- I’m making meaningful contributions in line with the company’s mission
- I’m continuously learning and growing
- I’m having fun!
If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be?
Ikigai is a Japanese concept that I’m very passionate about. Working in HR, I think everyone needs to find their ikigai, which is the intersection of these four things: doing what you’re good at, doing what you love, doing what you can get paid to do, and doing something good for the community. If you can find something in your life, which is at the intersection of these four things, then you’ve found your ikigai.
This is important as we know from the Gallup Q12 survey that only about 30% of the workforce is really “engaged.” There are so many people who go to work and come home from work and they’re doing it for a paycheck, not because they are happy and excited about it.
I really want to help people find their ikigai to address this huge gap in engagement and happiness.
We are very blessed to have some of the biggest names in Business, VC, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world whom you would love to have a private lunch with, and why?
That would have been John Lennon. He was such a deep thinker and connected his music to world issues and the common man and woman.
One of the lines from his song, Beautiful Boy, always makes me think about my role as a father and as a person — “life is what happens to you while you’re busy making other plans.”
Thank you so much for taking the time to share your valuable insights with us!
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